“Delicious! Setting the Table for a Food Exhibit”

By Joyce E. Chaplin, Ph.D.

The Humanities Council is partnering once again with the Harvard Club of West Virginia to present a free public lecture by a Harvard faculty member. Joyce E. Chaplin, Harvard University Professor of Early American History, will present “Delicious! Setting the Table for a Food Exhibit” at 7:00 p.m. on May 10^th in the Erma Byrd Gallery on the campus of the University of Charleston. The event is sponsored by Bailey & Glasser LLP.

The surviving menu from a 1910 Harvard University dinner at the Parker House restaurant is the focal point of a food exhibit now being developed by Professor Chaplin. She uses this menu in her talk to discuss food traditions, including why certain ways of eating have vanished, changes in the basic nature of food, dining rituals and implements, food and social status, and the renewed interest in local food sources.

Joyce E. Chaplin holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Johns Hopkins University, and a BA from Northwestern.  She is a former Fulbright Scholar who has taught at five universities on two continents, on an island, and for a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. Her reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal. Her most recent book, a history of around-the-world travel, is Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (2012).